Chapter 1

Romilly's POV

Eight years after Lucan Altieri left Chicago, he finally came home as the new Don—and to get married.

That same day, I received my final verdict. After eight years of endless dialysis and a rejected kidney, my doctor took my mother aside and told her there was nothing left to try. All the hospital could do now was buy me a little more time.

Mom was helping me out of a cab and into my wheelchair when a black car pulled up next door. Lucan stepped out with his fiancée.

He stopped when he saw me. His gaze dropped to the wheelchair, and his mouth curled into a smirk.

"Well, Quinlan. Eight years, and this is what you're reduced to?"

I tugged my sleeve down over the bruised, ruined veins of my dialysis fistula. "I broke my leg on the ice."

He laughed and pulled his fiancée closer. "Perfect timing, then. I'm getting married. You should be a bridesmaid."

I smiled back at him. "I can't. I won't be here to see it."

Then I patted my mother's hand. Without a word, she turned my wheelchair and pushed me inside.

——

Mom had barely gotten me into bed and tucked the blanket around me when the doorbell rang.

It was Cordelia Altieri.

Lucan's mother.

"Romilly." She hesitated. "I need to ask you for something."

She didn't have to finish. I knew that look—urgent, a little guilty. I'd seen it once before, the day she pushed open the door of my hospital room.

I was nineteen, and I'd just been diagnosed with stage four chronic kidney disease. Doctors couldn't explain how a perfectly healthy girl could lose most of her kidney function in a matter of weeks. They just called it bad luck.

Lucan's mother had always been ice-cold to me. Yet in the month before our breakup, she'd suddenly started brewing me a special pot of chamomile tea at our Sunday dinners. I thought she was finally warming up to me.

So when she found me sobbing into my mother's shoulder that day, I actually thought she'd come to comfort me.

Instead, the proud Mafia matriarch dropped to her knees beside my bed.

"Romilly, I'm begging you. Let Lucan go."

"Don Giuseppe is failing, and he still hasn't named a successor. Lucan's father is dead—our branch's claim is hanging by a thread. His uncles, his cousins, every one of them is circling that chair like sharks that smell blood."

"But the Don has finally given his word: whoever goes to Palermo and takes over the port business in Sicily earns the right to sit in it. Lucan has to go. Now. And if he finds out you're sick, he'll never leave."

She grabbed my hand, and her nails bit into my skin.

"If he doesn't go, he's out. And in a family like ours, Romilly, out doesn't mean broke. It means dead. You love him, don't you? Then don't be the reason he dies."

"I've already set it up. There's an errand boy from our restaurant who'll play along. All you have to do is make Lucan believe you've fallen for someone else, then break it off."

Because of those words, the first thing I did after my diagnosis wasn't starting dialysis. It was staging my own ruin.

I let a boy whose face I can't even remember into my living room. When Lucan let himself in with his spare key, he found us tangled on the couch, shirts unbuttoned. While he stared at us in sickened disbelief, I told him I didn't love him anymore. That we were done.

I drove him to Sicily with my own two hands.

Now his mother was standing beside my bed again.

"Don't hate me, Romilly. I don't have a choice. Nerissa is a Leocata—her father controls half the port in Palermo. Once this marriage happens, nobody will ever be able to touch Lucan's position. They're perfect for each other in every way that matters. I can't let anything ruin it."

"You know how protective he's always been of you. If he ever finds out what really happened back then, I'm afraid he'll..."

She trailed off, and her voice dropped.

"So for now, could you please just stay away from him? I mean... you don't have much time left anyway, do you? It's not like you're in any shape to go out."

The words were barely out of her mouth before my mother exploded.

She snatched the pack of adult diapers off the nightstand and slammed it down on the bed. "Say that again," she spat. "Look at her and say it again."

She was shaking, two seconds away from going for Cordelia's throat.

I caught her arm and gave it a little shake, the way I used to when I was a kid wheedling for something.

"Mom."

Slowly, she sank onto the edge of the bed. I turned back to Cordelia, calm.

"I can promise you I won't tell him what happened eight years ago. But I can't promise I won't see him."

I couldn't. Not one day had passed in eight years without me thinking about Lucan.

Three times a week, four hours at a time, two thick needles in my arm while my blood left my body and came back again. Whenever I didn't think I could sit through another session, I held on to the photo of the two of us at Navy Pier when we were seventeen.

I'd had more than a dozen surgeries and more ICU stays than I could count. A few times my heart stopped, and the doctors did compressions until my ribs cracked.

And through all of it, Mom was at my bedside, screaming herself hoarse.

"Romilly Quinlan, you promised me! You promised you'd live! You said once you got better, we'd fly to Italy together, you'd tell him the truth yourself, and we'd bring him home! If you die, you'll never see Lucan again—do you hear me?"

It was his name, screamed over and over, that dragged me back from the edge every time.

But in the end, I lost anyway.

And Lucan had built a new life. A new woman. A wedding.

Even so, a little time near him in whatever days I had left—that would be enough.

So the day I heard he was coming home, I signed myself out of the hospital against medical advice. My doctor said leaving meant giving up.